Science Friday Features Candid Creatures

UPDATE: Roland Kays also appeared on Science Friday’s radio program on May 6, 2016, reaching 1.5 million listeners on 374 public radio stations!

Today, NPR’s Science Friday posted an awesome article about our client’s book Candid Creatures. Here’s an excerpt from Julie Leibach’s clever piece. Be sure to check out her entire post for more, including a selection of our amazing photos:“A new book of unabashed selfies has been released, but it reveals neither hide nor hair of a Kardashian. There is, however, plenty of hide and hair. Candid Creatures: How Camera Traps Reveal the Mysteries of Nature, by zoologist Roland Kays, is an album of wildlife photos captured with camera traps—devices that researchers install in the field to record members of the animal kingdom as they lope, scamper, or climb about their business. Kays’ book is also a rich summary of the insights that scientists have gained from using these tools.

“In essence, modern camera traps work like this: When a warm-blooded animal (or a reptile heated by the sun) walks in front of the device, an infrared motion-sensing component detects a change in heat signature, which triggers a digital camera to snap a photo. It’s then up to the researchers to recover the memory card containing the footage.

“It’s kinda like Christmas every time you open the camera trap and get to see what pictures you get,” says Kays, a research associate professor at North Carolina State University and the director of the Biodiversity Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, who often uses camera traps in his work.

“Of course, there are millions of crappy pictures of animal butts,” he concedes, but when you hit upon a great shot of, say, a coyote in the middle of a frame, “you’re like, ah, that’s cool.” For Candid Creatures, Kays compiled what he calls the “greatest hits” of global camera trapping efforts, consisting of more than 600 photos from 153 research groups, including his own.”